power & empire: reflections on u.s. elections, 2020

Africa World Now Project

The current national political climate, as we have been highlighting, at least for the past 4 years, on AWNP is rooted in the cultural practices inherent in the global imposition of structures and systems born out of specific experiences and communities of peoples on the geographical land mass called Europe.

These historical and contemporary experiences have evolved across time and space, all while these various groups attempted to grapple with their particular and collective inefficiencies through the violent spread of its worldview—the creation of a European modernity—and the proliferation of it institutions that extract the legitimacy and consent of its viability from the peoples and communities it deemed its God-given right to conquer.

In short, we are witnessing the entity called Europe, its philosophical, and nation-state children, attempt to discover a state that it cannot possibly understand on its own—that is a state of peace & equality. This is because of the 1000-year process to restructure what it means to be human as a justification for the creation and maintenance of private property.

The U.S. is a settler state, still trying to reconcile its birth, flirting with arrested notions and an limited imagination that can only understand ideas such as, democracy [even its own mythic creation], justice, and citizenship as exclusionary processes. There is no debate about this.

We, certainly, will not debate anyone about this fact. One will either take courage to see the materialization of injustice, inequities and invest their talents into addressing them, radically.

Or continue to be cowardice and turn a blind eye to the deep structural implications of these injustices and inequities. Because it takes a weak and cowardice person or group of persons to derive their sense of superiority to the determinant of creating the ‘Other’. It is a false and porous position at best.

The contradictions, its ethos, its worldview, rooted in anti-blackness, anti-indigeneity, anti-nature, anti-human, anti-communal was and is this nation’s Achilles heel [this Achilles-heel reference is with layered inference and intended critique]. But it must be made clear that no nation is an abstract entity, no institution exists in suspended animation. It is made up of people, who carry out its purpose. The institutions of a settler state require sacrifices. It requires the sacrifice of mind, body and spirit. It requires the non-living. But once those non-living, become living again, the survivability of such institutions and systems as birthed from the settler state, will ultimately turn on its keepers.

In an article titled, Among the Ruins of Victory, the argument presented suggests that “Donald Trump [a representation of a way of being] was a test run. Worse than him is coming down the road within the decade. Get busy building. Movement activists who supported Biden emphasized that his presidency would give the movement breathing room. Okay. We have maybe two years, tops, to prepare for an even more vicious, popular wave of reaction.”

Today’s program will explore the implications as just set out…

Next, you will hear, AWNP’s Mwiza Munthali contextualize today’s program, a recent discussion hosted by Transnational Institute [TNI] and the Institute for Policy Studies where scholars and activists analyze the global consequences of the recent U.S. elections.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Enjoy the program!